We are afraid to touch
with our unfolding hands;
they have a life of their own.
Our spirits move forward
when we command our bodies,
never sensing which hand
will come to life
and overpower the other.
A part of us is always moving
and not moving
in the darkness
where there are too many
degrees of freedom,
where a hand only knows
what it touches.
I.
In 1910, the denizens of Wellington
awoke to a thundercrack and lightning
at the base of Windy Mountain:
in seconds, a snowpack
overhanging the east portal
in the Cascade Range
gave way to a tumult,
which skimmed the Bailets Hotel
and barreled into the Tye River Valley.
Ninety-six carcasses
were pulled from the wreckage
of the Spokane Express and a mail car,
placed on Yukon sleds
and lowered down a cliff at Windy Point.
Today, a sign at the edge of the ravine
lists the victims from both cars:
a nurse from Sacred Heart;
a sheepherder from Trinidad;
a handful of lawyers and salesmen;
a writer by the name of McGirl;
an eight-month-old infant;
countless young brakemen.
Scattered among the ruins
are rusted boilers, pistons,
valve gears, chimneys,
and sandpipes curled around trees–
overlooked by snow sheds
with collapsed walls,
suspended in rebar
like rocks in a spider’s web.
II.
A protest was raised in train 25,
snowbound in the depot on the way
to Skykomish. Two lawyers escaped,
slid down the switchbacks
below Cascade Tunnel,
hurling end over end
to the bottom of the gulch.
There, Jesseph and Merritt
sipped whiskey from hipflasks,
content to have survived the petition.
III.
Ida Starret was discovered
at the edge of the chasm
between a hemlock tree
and the crumpled car,
her infant son stilled to silence
after hours of crying
under her bosom
under the snow-laden boughs;
Providence decreed
her second son would live,
a stick cut from his head
in a makeshift ward
in the enginemen’s bunkhouse.
IV.
You brought me here
among the ghosts, among
the ruin, you knew
what I might construe:
and still you wait for me,
to see what I will carry back with me
from the valley of injured children.
The wire burns between my palms,
your face eclipsed by a wild copse
above the cliff;
what could you expect?
I bear no artifacts for you,
no leaves from Bhutan,
no relics of the True Cross
no cuspids from Siddhartha’s mouth,
no secrets from the severed veil;
I only bring my own catastrophe
ascending toward
the Iron Goat Trail.
We meditate on the eve of my father’s death,
under the tutelage of Tetsuzen
under the aegis of syncretic faith,
under a cross in Campion Chapel.
Tetsuzen straightens my back with his palm
and stick, and my father sits up with me.
Tetsuzen angles my chin with his palm
and stick, my mother is looking with me.
But when he taps the singing bowl and chants
all my spirits are rendered meaningless–
instead your breath entrains with mine, our hands
enjoin in the same mudra, in silence:
there is no sacrament, no wine or bread,
and tonight even the koans are dead.
I.
A wave:
A mountain writ small.
A breath:
Substrate of the clouds.
A flame:
Remnant of a star.
A lie:
Progenitor of truth.
A life:
Congress of the devils.
A death:
Corpus of the same.
II.
What did Heraclitus say?
We are baptized with every step.
What did Schopenhauer dream?
Ask the burning Shiva, or Vishnu in repose.
What did Giacometti see?
A thousand portraits of a nose.
III.
Whatever you inferred, I intended.
I.
Your sins, random in youth,
form a lattice in time—
you sense the warp and weft
of its frame, a congruence
of branches and bones,
misplaced vines and nerves:
a template of your life emerges,
a blighted map leading
to a hollow under the roots.
II.
A scold of jays bursts outward
from your crown, their voices
scattered in the evening sky—
leaves cascading
from a harried canopy
like hairs falling
from an old man’s head.
The faceless child whose weight pressed into
the mattress beside you last night was never
meant to comfort; she comes first as terror,
a small rupture reminding you of something lost.
You lay there pinned, watching the dark
gather around her smooth, unreadable face—
a surface offering nothing, and somehow
offering you back to yourself.
You told me you prayed, hoping she’d release
the tight braid of your bodies, and how
a vast hand—God’s, you said—filled the doorway,
spilling gold dust over everything you feared.
And then you rose together, unbound,
unfolding into a single standing figure—
a shape I recognized the moment it resembled me.
One week beyond the ill-fated future
augured by unknown Mayan priests, my child
will awaken unscathed, her earthly host
redeemed by Providence, her beloved
father beside her, immured from the light
in a makeshift tent. She is my daughter,
born half of light and darkness, a daughter
I’m unable to shield from the future,
where there is neither benevolent light
nor abject darkness– I fear for my child
nevertheless, for she is my beloved,
my stark mirror. Soon her mother will host
our seventh Christmas morning; she will host
her own scattered shadows, too, our daughter
among the whispers (though no less beloved)
We are the remnants of the same future
shimmering in time around our only child,
like silver wrapping paper catching light.
like reflections in opposing mirrors,
create infinite vistas of similarity.
it is impossible to parse
a singular form from the array
of cascading beings
that are merely endlesss
repetitions of you.
“There is no music in The Firebird” – Sergei Prokofiev
“Prokofiev is wasting time with ballets” – Igor Stravinsky
I. Danse
Tonight’s prompt was placed
by my leather journal, randomly
selected by my wife.
I am indifferent to cherries,
equally so to prompts.
II. Exentrique
Stravinsky said constraints
will set you free, and serve only
to obtain precision of execution.
But then, he was never
constrained by three cherries
(though otherwise entranced
by Petrushka chords).
III. Cantique
Synchronicity, magic, or riposte?
The next morning
three orange vitamins
appeared in their place.
As a child, I carried odd, prescient dreams—
small details: where a buried locket slept,
or some lost trinket hid itself in seams
of neighborhoods I’d wandered only in sleep.
No one cared much, not really, until I said
our dog would die beneath a freighted truck;
and then my father, startled, bowed his head.
From that night on, my family left luck
outside the door. We’d gather late, confer
in the living room—my “visions” guiding moves
or money, or anything that might occur
to grown-ups fearing consequence. They approved
my awkward teenage ramblings, granting weight
reserved for augurs dreaming out the state.
My guide came early—four years old, I think—
small, and dreadful. She had no eyes at all
and lived beneath the stairs, her lavender skin
turned always inward, studying the wall.
At night, The Blonde unraveled space for me,
dilated time, whispered sideways truths
my parents swore they heard when I’d half-flee
my bedroom—her words still clinging to my mouth.
But gifts grow thin. I see faint shapes now—slips
of futures drifting just beyond the frame;
and though she speaks, her voice arrives eclipse-
blurred, changing bodies, changing even her name
to meet me where I am. I try to hear,
but all her meanings scatter when they near.
jaznoblog 